Marketers have long made use of data on spending habits, demographics, behavior patterns and other information regarding consumers in order to guide the marketing of financial products, consumer packaged goods, pharmaceuticals, and other products and services. Direct marketing efforts targeted at individual consumers have become more and more common as marketers leverage the growing wealth of individual consumer data available. Growing use of credit cards and the emergence of electronic commerce and the Internet have expanded the amount of consumer information available in electronic form. Data-driven marketing in general and direct marketing in particular have increasingly taken advantage of expanded electronic marketing data On-line marketing activity has grown rapidly as Internet-based communications has expanded. Such on-line marketing activity includes, for example, offerings directed to individuals through e-mail accounts and the use of web browser cookie files to target web page banner ads. As is known in the art, cookie files may be installed by a web site server on the computer hard disk drive of a browsing consumer. Cookie files typically include information indicating that the browser has visited that web site.
Businesses are increasingly utilizing a combination of marketing information such as consumer lists, demographic profiles and customer segmentation to learn more about who their customers are, what new products they may wish to purchase, how to best maintain their existing customer base, and how to entice new customers. Some businesses seek to integrate both external and internal customer data with a heavy emphasis on consumer behavioral data. The phenomenal growth of the Internet has spawned a new area of interest. As the number of Internet users, and more specifically the number of Internet shoppers, increases, the demand for Internet market information and online purchase behavior has boomed.
Database analysis tools enable marketers to test hypotheses regarding consumer behavior across large consumer data sets. For example, a conventional database analysis can test the hypothesis that consumers living in the 30338 area code are more likely to make a major furniture purchase within six months of buying a new car. Data mining tools, on the other hand, enable marketers to learn about consumer behavior by applying sophisticated learning algorithms to large consumer data sets. Data mining enables marketers to reveal new consumer behavior hypotheses rather than simply test existing hypotheses. For example, data mining can reveal a hitherto unknown strong correlation between purchases of beer and disposable diapers among married men between 6 PM and 10 PM on weekdays. With such new knowledge at their disposal, marketers can develop marketing programs accordingly.
Armed with knowledge gleaned from the application of data mining algorithms to consumer data sets, marketers can target specific offerings to particular individuals described by a unique marketing profile. These targeted marketing efforts strike many as an invasion of privacy, so governments in the United States and abroad increasingly are restricting the uses to which individual marketing data can be put.
Unfortunately, conventional marketing systems are built around the capability to target individual consumers in the systems' marketing database. These conventional marketing systems by design thus do not shield personal consumer data from marketers. Moreover, conventional marketing systems are often built around databases containing old data, so offerings are sometimes targeted to individuals no longer described by the marketing profile. In addition, conventional marketing systems do not enable marketers to access marketing information on-line and/or do not accumulate data from on-line consumer activity. Conventional marketing systems, moreover, are focused on a few specific market segments (consumer packaged goods or pharmaceuticals, for example) and are therefore not useful to a broad range of businesses serving other market segments; forcing those businesses to rely on anecdotal market information or to perform costly market research on their own.